The fast end is a removal that had a clean basis
Our fastest documented result took eight days. A woman's record had been expunged and the top result for her name was still the old one, so the basis was clean, the request went to the right place in the right format, and the page came off. We also checked 281 aggregator records in that engagement and none of them were still hers at the end of it. That work is written up in the expunged record case study.
Eight days is the good case and it is not the promise. It happened because the paperwork existed and the sites involved answer requests. Where a publisher has no removal process at all, and plenty do not, there is no eight-day version of that.
Three months is a realistic clear on a public record
Six page-one bankruptcy results to zero took three months. Four of the aggregators came down outright and the rest were outranked, which is the normal shape of a result: part removal, part arithmetic. The bankruptcy case study has the sequence.
A bankruptcy petition also puts your street address online, so that engagement is really two jobs running at once, and the second one is the slower of the two.
Six months for the heavier situations
Nine negative page-one results tied to a federal case took six months to clear. Aggregators were removed where they were eligible, real news coverage was outranked rather than touched, and nothing was faked to get there. The federal case study lays out what moved and what did not.
Real journalism does not come down and we do not ask it to. That is a boundary worth knowing before you pay anyone, because a firm that tells you it can remove a published news story is either going to fail or going to do something you would not want done in your name.
What makes yours faster or slower
Three things decide the clock: whether the paperwork exists, how many sites carry the copy, and whether anything accurate about you already ranks. A certified court order turns a refusal into a procedure. One court case landing on eight aggregators is eight timelines, not one. An existing website with history behind it gives the outranking work something to build on instead of starting at nothing.
The last one is why the package includes a website. Starting with a domain that has no age on it is the slowest possible beginning, and it is the part of the timeline most within our control on day one.